edited for sobriety porpoises
For anyone who hasn’t utterly given up on this topic yet, I would make a couple of observations.
Most importantly, the two most common assertions regarding theory and experiment are both faulty. That is because:
a) no one has actually succeeded in doing “the experiment” yet (ridiculous and one-off things like the infamous concrete flute story notwithstanding); nobody has done anything rigorous empirically with uilleann pipes.
b) the empirical tests, if attempted, will most likely either be rubbish (because the player or instrument are not up to standard), or they will fail to be double-blind. And it’s true of course that there are no “identical” instrument bores, so the whole thing would have to hinge on a statistical sample of many “nearly identical” (and carefully measured!) instruments.
c) the theories which purport to prove that wall material does not matter are faulty because they contain numerous important oversimplifications. Just because a theory, in a simplified form, fails to account for a phenomenon, one cannot reasonably conclude that it does not exist. A full, rigorous solution of the wave equation for a woodwind instrument has never actually been achieved (i.e. though the equations can be written out, they have not been solved in practice for meaningful real instruments). The simplified theories, if used to ‘prove’ a point, are themselves subject to opinion as to which parts of a model are of “minor or secondary importance” and therefore may be omitted from the equations.
The top acoustical theorists will, nowadays, admit this, even if they remain sceptical of material effects. Some things that are known to stretch the limits of simplified models include: double reeds, narrow (i.e. < 6mm) bores; stopped ends; small toneholes relative to the bore. Of course the uilleann and union pipes present all of these features, so the acoustical models do not work as well for pipes as for flutes, clarinets, trumpets, etc. It also doesn’t make sense to extrapolate from arguments about gold-versus-silver for flutes (where bulk property differences are very small, and the bore quite large relative to boundary conditions), to principles about wood, whose bulk properties are quite obviously different from species to species. One need not ascribe any magical intrinsic properties to wood in order for this to be true; the properties of the wood will influence the shape of the bore and the properties of the important “boundary layer” where air meets wood, on a microscopic scale, even if the bores “measure up identically” on the macro level.
Makers are the people who are most likely to have built up sufficient experience to confidently deduce a materials effect from the “noise” of individual differences, from a large sample size of instruments. While this certainly injects subjectivity into the question, the vast majority of experienced makers have reached similar conclusions. In fact I have never spoken to an experienced pipemaker who said that it did not matter.
I was trained in engineering and the physical sciences, and before I made instruments (or at least before I had extensive contacts with wind instrument makers), I tended to believe the standard physics line that “it doesn’t matter”. My experience now tells me that it does indeed matter, so the question becomes “why does it matter”. I can think of several candidate physical phenomena which might account for it, but no one (much less me) has spun the necessary equations yet.
Bill
And therein lies the answer ,your experience tells you it matters because experienced pipemakers have told you it should.
In the end its science verus opinion and I think most people will agree on which one is the most dependable
RORY.
That’s not what he said. He has his own direct experience. You are missing the point that the existing scientific theory is not complete and is therefore an approximation.
I can also offer some concrete observations from two other types of instrument:
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I have owned two soprano saxophones of identical construction except for the material used for the main tube - one brass, one sterling silver. Played with the same mouthpiece and reed combination and recorded with the same mic, they produce radically different tones, obvious to the ear and visually obvious on the display of my EQ software.
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I have two bocals for my bassoon that I commonly use. Again they have the same bore and wall thickness, but are made of different materials and using a different annealing process. Not only is the tone very differerent but the response of the ‘soft’ bocal is completely different. It’s possible to start notes with a minimal attack but the volume is limited (it’s designed for chamber music).
I believe that the existing acoustic theory is 9X% there. What we hear as subtle differences in tone are in that final X%. One of the great recent advances in science is the realization that all the interesting stuff in the error term.
Don’t know if this analogy is on track and at the risk of criticism…if you play a CD through a loudspeaker at a set volume level in a room with a hard marble floor and plaster walls, it sounds drastically different from playing the CD through the same speaker,at the same level, in the same room with carpeting/drapes etc. So could the blackwood chanter represent the room with marble floors and plaster walls and boxwood the one with carpeting and drapes? Certain frequencies are reflected or absorbed differently due to slight differences in the wall/floor surfaces even though the sound source is identical.
Wow! This is great, I like it very much 
. Even if it might not be applicable for pipes, I would not care; I love your example, thank You John.
Miki
I think there might be another very important problem. It has been mentioned here a few times but not “expressis verbis”: The bore surface and it´s influence on the tone (and also performance). I think it quite obvious that different kinds of wood (porous wood, not metal or delrin) will “produce” different bore surfaces. A woodturner/woodworker of esteem will NOT use anything else but very sharp tools to produce good quality surfaces - which will vary from woodtype to woodtype. This especially goes for bore surfaces of woodwinds cause otherwise then by the reamer you can´t reach them anyway. Even a chanter bored with a “freshly” sharpened reamer might sound different to - lets say - No. 10 of the same wood.
Seems to me that Ted’s experiment with all the chanters of various woods by the same maker is about as rigorously scientific as we are going to get, in all probability.
I had a related experience not too long ago: at another convention of the National Flute Association I got to play several wood headjoints made by a certain maker on the same silver Boehm flute body. Of course the exact cut of no two embouchure holes is identical; however, just as in Ted’s experiment, the headjoints made of the same wood all had a certain commonality of tone and “feel” not shared by any of the headjoints made of any other wood, so that “blind” I could easily have sorted the headjoints correctly. Once again I suspect that with flutes the differences are more apparent to the player than to an outside listener.
Specifically, the boxwood gave a softer, rounder, more flexible tone (by flexible I mean that the pitch and timbre change easliy in response to changes in the player’s embouchure) while ABW gave a brighter, louder, less flexible tone. My favourite was Cocobolo because it seemed to give the “darkest” timbre and had some of the flexiblity of boxwood but some of the projection of blackwood.
After making many boxwood chanters and many blackwood chanters, I came to the conclusion that it was easier to make a mellower sounding reed for a blackwood chanter than it was to make a brighter sounding reed for a boxwood chanter. I usually enjoyed cutting through the sessiun noise like an ill tempered chainsaw, so I preferred the blackwood. Ultimately, I found that the predictable nature of box’s instability, coupled with the time consuming aspect of trying to get a nice surface finish, led me to favor ABW. But opinions are like a holes - every chanter’s got one.
And the winning quote of the day goes to:
Fecking classic! LOL!
Pat.
there’s certainly some effen “sea monsters” on South Beach, so at least we know THAT is true! (God help us!
As someone who’s followed this argument umpty-bazillion-and-a-half times with respect to flutes, I would agree with the people who are saying that the finish of the bore (which is influenced by the type of wood) is probably the main factor at play in the differences we hear.
If you take the headjoint off a boxwood flute, point the body of the flute toward a light, and look down the bore, in most cases the bore will appear duller than that of a blackwood flute. The term “a dull bore” is redundant when used to describe people, but in this case it’s appropriate. I have two blackwood flutes and a boxwood one and can vouch that the bore of the boxwood reflects less light. A blackwood flute’s bore can have a nearly mirror-like finish.
My hunch is that the microscopically rougher finish of the boxwood bore creates more turbulence in the air column, making the sound more complex and perhaps less “pure.” I hear it as almost a foggy quality compared with the more laser-beam tone of blackwood, although one can make a blackwood flute sound more complex by deliberately perturbing the bore with chambers, as was done by the makers Rudall and Rose, for example.
I also agree with those who say that the experiment necessary to prove/disprove that “materials don’t matter” is probably impossible to perform. There is so much handwork involved in making chanters and flutes that you really can’t make two identical instruments to do the test.
There was a famous experiment in which a researcher named Coltman made a wooden flute and then made a cast of it to produce an “identical” flute out of concrete. He played both flutes for an audience, who couldn’t hear any difference between the two. It would have been better if the audience had been a sonogram machine; in fact I think he performed subsequent experments using sonagrams and similarly found no difference; he sent me his research papers years ago and I have them here somewhere. But I don’t think that sets the matter to rest; it’s quite possible that the concrete and wooden flutes had similar finishes in the bore and thus produced the same tone.
Brad, is your experience like mine, that boxwood flutes have a more responsive, flexible tone than blackwood? That it’s easier to produce a bold, ringing, projecting tone on a blackwood flute?
All this makes me think that I should be playing a boxwood uilleann chanter as I love a darker, softer tone on pipes.
No, I wouldn’t say that about boxwood flutes. Responsiveness and “flexibility” in tone are I think qualities that depend more on the embouchure hole and the individual player than the type of wood. And I know a few owners of boxwood flutes who produce a hard, focused, penetrating tone when they play. But I do think the “mellow” quality that many people ascribe to boxwood flutes (and chanters) has to do with an additional layer of complexity in the sound, maybe it boils down to more overtones or “turbulence” or just plain old magic, or maybe it’s just our imagination, but I do feel that boxwood sounds different. Whenever I play a friend’s blackwood Bb flute and then pick up my boxwood Bb flute, my girlfriend says the blackwood one sounds deeper even though they’re tuned to the same note.
There was a famous experiment in which a researcher named Coltman made a wooden flute and then made a cast of it to produce an “identical” flute out of concrete. He played both flutes for an audience, who couldn’t hear any difference between the two.
man, I wonder if I can cast a reed out of concrete?
The one I have now is really great but it won’t last forever 
Without any doubt, hard & softwoods produce different resonances because of there fibre scructure, go and clank some different peices of wood together, and the penny will drop, it very simple understand. 
While I understand that this makes intuitive sense, by all accounts it is dead wrong. Flutes and chanters are not resonating instruments. If you were talking about guitar or violin soundboards that would be a different matter.
Quite right.
While it cannot be proven that materials do not affect woodwind tone, it is relatively simple to disprove most of the explanations put forward by non-acousticians regarding materials and woodwind tone production. The ‘resonance’ behaviors of wood do not enter into it - unlike the case of “soundbox” instruments like violins, guitars, pianos, etc., where resonance behaviors are paramount.
Unfortunately these sorts of misunderstandings often lead physicists to - unfairly - dismiss the claims of musicians and instrument makers regarding woodwind materials and tonal effects altogether.
Luckily, if you want a different tone from your chanter, you can make another reed. Works every time. If, after numerous attempts, you are unable to find the desired timbre, it is likely that the chanter dimensions are to blame and not the species of tonewood.
I understand (I think) what you guys are saying, and I’ll definitely defer
to the more experienced perspectives,but, if chanters and flutes weren’t resonating instruments, you wouldn’t hear them.
My question is: does the chanter have a dampening effect on the reed itself?
Or on the energy created by the reed?
This same type of question is debated by guitar players in reference to the non-resonating parts of the guitar. The saddle,nut, frets and choice of wood the fingerboard is made of have an effect on the sustain of the string and how the energy in the string is translated to the soundboard of the guitar.
I understand that chanters aren’t supposed to resonate the same way a soundboard on a guitar does.
But that doesn’t mean they don’t…